When it comes to voting for the Cy Young, the decision to remove luck from performance is one that’s fraught with nuance. Good luck trying to figure out where to put the line between ‘adjusting out the luck’ and ‘figuring out what the pitcher actually did.’ The good news, for your fantasy team at least, is we don’t really care so much about the latter. We just want to strip luck from the previous outcomes as much as possible, so we can figure out who will be good going forward.

So when we’re metric shopping, we really only care about in-season prediction. Which metrics predict the future better than past ERA? Well, that’s a low bar, most of them do, that’s the point for most of them. But FIP — fielding independent pitching — is such a blunt hammer, as it only considers walks, strikeouts, and home runs. Have we come up with anything better?